THRILLED TO DEATH: Selected Stories, by Lynne Tillman
Lynne Tillman is an emissary from a vanishing literary culture that you want to describe as “downtown,” regardless of where she actually lives. Manhattan, according to her book bio, but with a bassist, not a banker — as so many downtowners are today.
Nothing staying the same is a big Tillman theme, minus any nostalgic gauze. “I don’t make good use of time,” one of her meta-narrators says in “Thrilled to Death,” a thorough if not complete selection of her short stories. “I waste a lot of it, and it wastes me.”
Tillman’s style is spare and spiky. She is a jill-of-all-genres, having written novels and criticism and oral histories of Andy Warhol and Books & Company, the dearly departed Upper East Side bookstore next to, and bullied out by, the old Whitney Museum. Her last book, “Mothercare,” was a long autobiographical essay, an unsentimental education in managing the decline of a problematic parent.
“Thrilled to Death” is dedicated to Tillman’s late father. Its contents, which date from the 1980s to the present, were selected and arrayed by the author in what she calls “associative” order.
The lack of dates keeps the reader on high alert, not so much on her toes as afloat out of time, as if in a dream. And Tillman’s characters teem with dreams. “Dreams, the mind’s gifts, can be sweeter than anything reality offers, and they satisfy me more than sex,” thinks the protagonist of “The Undiagnosed,” who shows up at a masquerade party wearing her neurotic, dead dad’s suit. Another guest is dressed as a rose, “his penis … a thorn in his side.”
Clint Eastwood is at the party, too. “It’s not a good time to be a man,” he tells our heroine. Their small talk is perfectly natural, philosophical and hilarious.
Keeping tally of the celebrities that pop up is one way to orient yourself in Tillman’s wide-ranging, bumpy landscape of mostly ordinary lives. In “Dead Talk,” Marilyn Monroe contemplates her nether regions with a hand mirror and imagines a lakeside visit with the son she never had, before drifting off to her final oblivion. In “Angela and Sal,” the brooding bisexual actor Sal Mineo picks up the check for the narrator at the Hard Rock Cafe in London and waits for her in his limo, two years before he is knifed to death. She’s seen him once before, on Fifth Avenue, while buying her father a humidor.
“Ironic coincidence is common as mud in actual life but appears less often in fiction because it might seem contrived,” Tillman notes. She pokes the fourth wall so often it’s like a PVC shower curtain. Wordplay abounds. A character in the title story, set at a carnival, is named Paige Turner.
Form-wise, there is nothing predictable or comforting about this work. “Future Prosthetic@?” is a Jabberwockyish riff so committed to its whacked-out machine language — “narnt into funking a doodle,” etc. — and redolent of recent discontents around artificial intelligence that I had to look up when it was written (2015, for an anthology of flash science fiction).
“Myself as a Menu” is divided into courses, rendered in old-fashioned typewriter font, preoccupied with various visits to the “nuthouse” and signed Lynne Tillman. Another story reveals “Lynne Tillman” to be the pen name of a “real” person, Patricia Mergatroyde. Somehow, whoever-she-is has zipped these 40-odd textured pieces, plus an introduction by Christine Smallwood and afterword by Lucy Sante, into fewer than 300 pages, like fur coats in a packing cube.
Tillman is attuned to humanity’s animalness, and animals themselves. In a relationship triangulated with her analyst (remember those?), Helen of “The Substitute” meets a man with the canine name Rex, and they sniff each other like “intrigued dogs.”
“That’s How Wrong My Love Is” is devoted to mourning doves, its narrator mulling the ethics of why she feeds and cares for them and not the bigger, uglier pigeons. “Boots and Remorse” is a little horror movie about a pair of adopted cats that should probably come with a parental advisory sticker.
Tillman writes for grown-ups, but the kind who are constantly tending to their inner children. (Helen “was astonished at how adolescence malingered in every cell of her mature body.”) In an era of truncated attention spans, her short stories, some verging on micro, seem newly with-it. Her one-liners can do more than certain entire volumes.
“She used to be an editor for a Condé Nast publication before she started hitting the bottle.”
“The unclear family.” (Variation of nuclear.)
“I don’t like endings.”
Who does?
THRILLED TO DEATH: Selected Stories | By Lynne Tillman | Soft Skull Press | 320 pp. | $27
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010. More about Alexandra Jacobs
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